Sessions at Cascadia Ruby 2011 with slides

Saturday 30th July 2011

"Playfulness at Work"--does that mean "bringing play into the workplace" or "the way playfulness works?" Both, actually. Seven years after _why wrote "Wearing Ruby Slippers to Work," it's time to don the entire Ruby-encrusted tuxedo and storm the workplace. We'll discuss ways to keep work playful (and as a side effect do better work), including:

Dealing with crusty data formats and protocols in a lighthearted way

Scripting other people's software (whether they know it or not)

Sharing your code with co-workers without annoying them

Deploying your programs to honest-to-goodness paying customers

And because no Ruby discussion is complete without a bit of armchair sociology, we'll do some hand-waving about the importance of play to the mind and to the team.

Unscheduled

We will discuss my personal and humble beginnings in ruby being a young college grad, entering the world of ‘professional’ software development. The Array class in Ruby immediately fascinated me. Soon, the Hash class would join its company. I finally found the granddaddy of them all, the Enumerable module.

We will explore how the Enumerable module empowers some of our favorite Ruby types (Array, Hash). We will then also take a brief look at the Standard Lib Set class (introduced in 1.9) that further shows the beauty of the Enumerable module to create data structures in Ruby. Finally, we'll see a naive implementation of another data structure using the Enumerable module.

The purpose of this talk is to share and encourage others (especially people new to Ruby) to explore core classes and Ruby. Spend time staring at methods in our classes and dare to tinker. I guarantee that doing so will be a start of a fruitful and passionate love affair with Ruby!